Capital AudioFest Chronicles 2022
Rick Begins... 6th Floor Part A
Show Report By By Rick Becker

Room 621 Gershman Acoustics
The Gershman Acoustics room was a scaled-down version of their presentation in Toronto three weeks earlier where they earned a "Best Room" award. Unlike Toronto, they used a VPI 40th Anniversary direct drive turntable with their Voyager Phono preamp. Digital was the Innuos Statement with the Next-Gen power supply. The amplification was with the Eon Art Quark integrated amplifier. The faceplate of this amp is the front of a drawer that glides out to reveal and access the circuitry.

The critical parts of the circuitry are contained on an eight-layer PCB that is replaceable, so years down the road, you can have a re-born amplifier, fresh as new. It is built to aerospace standards and costs about $70k CDN. It really should have been positioned on an amp stand where it could have been more readily displayed. Its construction was simply astonishing, and the sound here with the Gershman Grande Avant Garde speaker ($17k CDN) was also excellent, but not at the same level as what I heard in Toronto.

A major difference would be the Oracle turntable, but also, I've heard this speaker many times, and as small as it appears, it does even better in larger rooms where the speaker has room to breathe and the room has long dimensions for the bass to develop. The extended 'platform' off the back is hollow and the additional volume is tuned for the woofer. This speaker can play in much larger rooms than you would imagine. Check out the Toronto Audiofest 2022 report here. Cabling was by Cardas.

Room 623 Infigo Audio and Illusio Audio
This was a second room hosted by Infigo and it was an entirely different set-up with Illusio Audio Alana speakers with matching (in form, not color) LORA stands ($30k). These are also available in wood veneer. Much less obvious was the Illusio Audio subwoofer system incorporating four subwoofers and two additional amplifiers ($5k). The room had the subwoofer set up and calibration done by J.R. Boisclair ($2k/day, plus expenses).

One sub was behind the black Infigo Audio banner on the front wall. Another was on the back wall up on a table and I saw a third on a side wall. The black component on the left in the center was an Infigo preamp and the smaller black component on the right was a Resonance Audio (?) black box that I suspect had to do with the holographic imaging in this room. Next show, I will pay more attention to this.

Jeffrey Smith of Silversmith
Out in the hallway I was approached by a guy in a long trench coat who leaned into me and asked, "Wanna buy some cables?" In reality, it was Jeffrey Smith in a blue polo shirt with a big "N" on it that I suspect had something to do with his background in the U.S. Navy. In his hands were prototypes of his new single-ended and balanced interconnects made with a flat weave of the special metal he digs out of his ranch in Wyoming. Jeff is best known for his wide, gold-color ribbon speaker cables that have been raved about by Greg Weaver in a review here.

I've spotted these speaker cables in rooms at shows that typically sounded very good. What was it that Frank Zappa sang?

Moving to Wyoming soon,
Gonna be an audio tycoon.
Well, at least some of what I say here is true.
Stay tuned.

---> Next Page.